


by a plastic bombshell bomb

by orphan_account



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, everybody's a little fucked up, idk how to tag this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:19:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>mental hospital au in which the boys are all patients at ashworth hospital. niall talks to his voices because they tell good stories and harry's not sure how he's supposed to connect when everything feels like a dream. also liam feels in colours and louis's not a psychopath, he swears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "deception and perfection are wonderful traits"

Ashworth Hospital is noted for its weekly test of the alarm system. They say it’s tested regularly to ensure that it will be able to warn the surrounding areas of any escaped patients, but there have only ever been two cases of partially successful escapes, so Louis calls that bullshit. No, he’s sure that they’re sounding the piercingly loud thing at 9 am every Monday as some form of whacked out punishment designed to make him grind his teeth.

Not to mention that the bunk mattresses are more like blocks of granite, and by some stroke of extreme stupidity (or maybe it had been the fact that he hadn't known him at the time), he’d let Nick take the top bunk, and Nick never sleeps for more than 5 hours. He’ll loudly write an entire novel maybe, or he’ll lay on his back and talk at the ceiling until 4 am just for the sake of hearing his own voice, but he won’t sleep until it’s near dawn, and no one would ever be able to tell because he wakes up with enough energy to fuel a small plane while Louis feels tired and slow and stupid for being awake. Louis doesn't know how he does it and he would applaud Nick if he wasn't so annoyed by him.

It’s just that, he’s been at Ashworth since he was 19, and he’s 21 now, so that’s roughly two years. And there are 52 Mondays in one year, and 52 multiplied by 2 equals 104. Louis has lived through approximately 104 screeching sirens waking him up before noon. He’s lucky he hasn't killed anyone yet.

And as far as he sees it, he shouldn’t even be in this place at all. Sure, he’d killed his biological father when he was 16, but he’d had reasons. The man had completely walked out on Louis and his mother when Louis had been all of, what, 5? Louis had had every right to do what he did. And what really irritates him the most is that he’d gotten away with it for three years before anyone caught on. He’s still not sure exactly how they caught on because he’s positive he covered his tracks stupendously, but someone caught on and now here he is in this gloomy psychiatric hospital with an overly talkative roommate, a bed of slate, and some 200 other terminally insane men. Some of whom he’ll catch whispering to walls or pissing on the linoleum of hallways. He doesn’t belong with these savages, honestly.

Today’s a holiday though, New Year’s Eve, and the staff has decided to not sound the alarm in favour of giving the surrounding public a few more hours of sleep. Louis would revel in that fact, if he wasn’t stuck living with -

“Rise and shine, Tomlinson, we have another day to face!”

And Louis swears if he had the right resources, he would either off himself or kill the chipper fucker. 

But he simply breathes through his nose once, keeps his eyes closed, and says calmly, “What time is it, Nicholas?” 

Louis can feel Nick’s head right next to his, disgustingly close, so he’s not surprised when the next answer sounds as if the older is literally inside his skull.

“I’m not entirely sure, but my internal clock says it’s far too late for us to still be asleep. So let’s up, it’s almost New Year’s!”

Louis sighs long and hard and opens his eyes, grabs the pillow from under his head, and swiftly hits Nick square in the face.

The older man splutters for about a half a second, leaning back from Louis’ bunk (much to Louis’ relief) and looking accusingly at the younger.

“I actually don’t think that was necessary,” he eventually manages.

Louis reluctantly sits up and runs his hands over his face before saying, “A lot of the things you do are highly unnecessary but I don’t complain.”

“You complain a lot, actually,” Nick shoots back, and Louis fixes him with a glare. 

“Has Paul even come around to unlock our doors yet?” he asks, already knowing Nick has been awake for a good few hours. 

“He came around just before I woke you up, and I’m guessing everyone’s in rec waiting on breakfast.”

So, Louis figures, if he hurries, he might not get stuck with cold powdered eggs and burnt toast and that in itself lightens his spirits a little.

-

The rec room is Ashworth’s poor idea of an activities room. There’s a little tv sitting off in one corner that’s outdated at least 30 years, because it’s got foiled antennae and this popping, static-y image that sets Louis’s nerves on edge. In another corner, there’s a play area full of toys meant to keep the mentally complex patients occupied and happy. But mostly, the only thing the dolls and blocks are used for is assault on hands and fellow patients alike, and Louis very much likes to stay away from that corner because George had pelted him in the middle of the forehead with a Hot Wheels his first week there and he doesn’t want to relive that incident. 

Corner Number Three holds tables where various board games are played, like chess and checkers and Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders and anything else you can think of, really. Louis stays in this corner a lot, because it’s quite entertaining to see middle aged men scream when they land on Park Place or full on tantrum when they’re forced to go down a chute instead of up a ladder and Louis read once that psychopaths have sadistic pleasures and tendencies and he guesses he fits that profile pretty nicely. 

So when Louis enters the room, he heads straight for Corner Three, and he sees Liam at one of the chess boards. He’s sitting alone, and playing against himself, and his face is scruffy, like he hadn’t bothered to try and shave and well.

Louis feels really bad for Liam. And it’s rare that Louis ever feels bad about _anything_ , let alone another person, but it’s different with Liam. Louis had been at Ashworth for almost a year when Liam arrived, and normally he would’ve just filed him off as another nameless patient, except it hadn’t worked that way. 

Louis thinks maybe it had been something with his eyes, something in the honey brown that didn’t look completely hopeless. Louis doesn’t bother with completely hopeless. And even after he had tricked Paul into telling him Liam’s backstory - of how the brown eyed boy had been in love and engaged until his fiancée had mysteriously died and he had lost it, shaving his head in a particularly nasty show of despair before abruptly retreating into himself - Louis still saw promise. 

So he walks up to the younger boy’s chess board and topples the white king to get his attention.

“Good morning, Louis,” Liam replies, reaching over to set the king back upright and glancing up quickly at the smaller boy. He gives a minuscule turn up of the corners of his mouth, and most would’ve missed the tiny smile, but Louis catches it and beams, turns the opposite chair around so he can settle onto it backwards. 

“Do you remember that bit in Harry Potter where they play chess and the pieces move by themselves and destroy each other when they conquer a space?” he asks, watching Liam move a black bishop diagonally so it can snag a white castle. 

“I believe they call it wizard’s chess,” Liam answers without looking up, moving the castle to the table off to the side where the captured black and white pieces reside. Louis tilts his head to side as he counts up the pieces and yes, just as he suspected, the game is a draw. 

“‘Stimes like this I wish it was real, I think. I mean, it’s the ideal game for the intellectual loner with way too much time on his hands, don’t you think?” 

Liam does look up then, reaches across the board to flick the white king at Louis’s chest and Louis watches it thunk against his shirt and clatter back onto the metal table. He looks up at Liam, only slightly affronted, and sighs through his nose. 

“What’s your mood today?” Louis asks softly, slowly setting the king upright on the table and folding his hands behind it. 

Liam sniffs once before he mutters, “Brown,” and ah, Louis has approached this from the wrong angle. After about a month of trying to decode Liam and his mood swings, Louis had come up with the colour system. He had introduced it to the younger boy as “the mood ring without the ring”. 

Yellow is neutral, not happy but not particularly sad, and if today had been a yellow day, Louis’s approach would have been a bit more acceptable. Liam is quiet and thoughtful and even a bit joke-y and laugh-y on those days and Louis thinks that maybe he’s a bit more himself.

Blue is sad, and on blue days Liam doesn’t leave his room unless Paul makes him. Louis doesn’t like those days because the small glint in Liam’s eyes completely snuffs out and he looks hollow and unwelcoming. 

Red is angry, and angry days are the scariest for Louis because Liam is completely unrecognisable. In the way that yellow days are quiet, red days are _loud_ , and volatile, and Liam will spend most all of them in solitary and some of them in the straightjacket, because the first red day they had left his hands free and he had scratched at his forearms until they bled. 

And finally there’s brown, which doesn’t really have a particular emotion behind it. Brown days are a mixture of blue and red, never too much blue, never too much red, and brown days are the most frustrating for Louis because all of his advances at conversation and activity are snuffed out with hostility. 

“Any reason?” Louis inquires, assuming Liam is done playing and reaching to the side to begin setting the pieces back to their respective squares.

“I just think it’s quite shit that we’re meant to celebrate another year of being here,” Liam whispers, and he nods toward Corner Four, where the staff congregates and oversees the patient activity. The table that usually contains newspapers and coffee cups is now covered in...are those hats? And streamers? And _decorative cups_? Louis drops the pawn he was moving. 

“They wouldn’t,” Louis says. 

“They are,” Liam replies. 

\- 

Parties in mental hospitals never work out. There’s screaming and hitting and destruction of property and this would be Louis’s favourite form of entertainment if it weren’t for the Opposite Game.

The Opposite Game is just as tediously trivial as it sounds. Each patient is given a hat with a certain theme attached to it, and they’re meant to find the person with the hat that oppositely corresponds with theirs. And then they’re supposed to "talk" with that person and "get to know them" and Paul told Louis once that it’s supposed to be a team building exercise and well. How much team building do they really think can occur when said team includes a few hundred crazy men?

Louis despises Opposite Game because he despises these people, and he never gets paired with Liam and it’s not that being in the company of new people makes him nervous, it’s that he doesn’t see the point of it. He knows all he needs to know about 98% of the people here and it’s that they each suffer from varying degrees of insanity and he has nothing in common with them. 

So the day drags on and Louis attempts to try and lift Liam’s spirits while masking his own drowned enthusiasm for the task ahead, but to no avail. Liam stays brown until 6 o’clock rolls around and everyone is herded into the rec room and Louis can quite literally feel the cloud of doom looming over his head. 

Paul is holding one of the double doors open and Louis taps Liam’s elbow with two fingers to let him know he’s leaving him but will only be a short while. Liam twists his mouth slightly to the right and continues into the room. 

Paul is Louis’s favourite hand because he’s the easiest to get information out of. Sometimes, Louis considers them something close to friends. 

“So do you have any idea why we’re being subjected to this bullshit so soon after Christmas?” he says as he walks over, moving to stand next to the man and adjusting the beanie atop his head. 

“Inside the rec room, Tomlinson," is all Paul says. He doesn’t look over to him. He keeps his eyes fixed on the heads passing by him. 

Louis isn’t worried though. 

“Do you really want to dance this dance again, Higgins?” he says tiredly, scrunching up his nose and shoving his hands into his hoodie pockets. “Because you’ve got two left feet and I always win.”

Paul presses his lips together in a hard line and doesn’t say anything else. Louis stares boredly at the side of his face and after a minute of no answer, he sighs loudly. The flow of patients is thinning and as much as Louis loves confusing things out of Paul and then leaving him flustered, he has to participate in this stupid game, and he at least wants to have a good choice in hat. 

“Well then,” he says, clapping the larger man on the shoulder. Paul has yet to look at him and Louis gives him mental kudos, because this is the most serious he’s ever seen him. Louis has full faith he’ll break that soon.

-

It’s 6:25 and Louis wants to get back in bed because quite frankly, he’d rather be asleep than standing against a wall in a dog hat. 

And the worst part is he hasn’t even got an opposite, he’s just _there_ , and Paul’s gotten a major stick up his arse and won’t let Louis leave.

So he’s pissed, to say the least. 

He drinks the last of his punch and crushes the paper 2013 cup in his hand, dropping it to the floor and kicking it with his foot. He’s scanning the room for Liam, but he can’t seem to find him, and that makes him a little more than slightly uneasy because he hates people but he doesn’t like being alone. He needs a familiar face to keep him level. 

So he’s folding his arms and shuffling his feet and he’s about to throw the silly hat in the trash and lift up his hood when the double doors open and Paul shows two new people in. 

And Louis’s never seen them, so he guesses they’re new arrivals, but new arrivals usually arrive in the morning, first thing, and Louis likes it that way because he thinks he makes his best decisions when he’s half awake and what better way to decide whether or not you dislike someone than when you’re disgruntled and hungry. 

The boys are complete opposites, but Louis can tell that they’re close in the way that they sort of...gravitate around each other. The smaller boy is pale and blond, with a set jaw and a smile in his eyes. His lips are moving, like he’s whispering to himself, and the fingers of his left hand are tapping out a rhythm on his thigh. 

But the second boy, he’s really the one that catches Louis’s attention. He’s tall, taller than the blond boy and almost taller than Paul, and he’s got broad shoulders that are sort of hunched in on himself. His hair is brown and curly, unruly on his head, and his lips are slightly parted while his fingers fidget with the stomach of his white t-shirt. And he keeps glancing down occasionally, flexing his fingers out and moving his lips, counting each one as if he’s checking to see if they’re still there, and Louis tilts his head to right and watches him. He watches as the three men walk past where he’s standing, and he steps forward slowly so he can get a better look. 

And normally, Louis wouldn’t care about new arrivals. He never cares about new arrivals. Liam is his only exception. 

But when the curly haired boy looks up and his green and glazed over eyes focus on Louis, he knows he has to get inside his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from "homewrecker" by marina & the diamonds


	2. "i saw a glimpse; a shimmer, a shadow"

When Harry was younger and he would dream, the whole world would be in sepia. He had read somewhere once that most people dream in black and white, and that if you dreamt in colour, the dream was supposed to hold some sort of special message behind it. But his dreams were never either or; never completely black and white but also never fully coloured, so he never knew which dreams to let slip away with the haze of sleep or cling onto in the hopes of decoding later.

Somewhere along the line, though, his filter had broken, and nothing seemed real anymore. 

“Syd has a situation for you,” comes Niall’s voice, cutting through the constant fog of Harry’s mind and forcing his eyes to focus in again. 

“What’s that?” he asks, shifting so he can look into the blond boy’s eyes. 

“So everyone’s purple, yeah? Like, their skin is purple, and they have mouths for eyes but also mouths for mouths, but the mouths have claws and they’re bleeding, yeah?” 

Harry’s eyes narrow and he nods, watching Niall’s blue’s jitter as the first two fingers of his left hand tap away at their shared armrest. 

“What would you do in that situation?”

“Probably lie down for a kip, if I’m being honest,” Harry answers, resting his hand atop Niall’s to slow the tapping before setting his hand in his lap. 

“That’s what you say to all of Syd’s situations, H,” Niall whines, moving his restless hand back to his thigh. “You’re supposed to change it up and try and guess the solution, you’re boring him.”

Harry rolls his eyes and snorts lightly. “What’s his solution, then?”

Niall pauses for a second, stops his tapping fingers almost completely as he listens intently to a voice that isn’t there. Harry waits, watches his eyes so he can stay present because this is normal, this is how they communicate. 

Finally, Niall smiles, shakes his head slightly, folding his hands and tapping the first two fingers of his left on the back of his right. 

“Give ‘em glasses, reckons they can’t see well without eyes.”

\- 

This is Harry and Niall’s second hospital since Carstairs and Harry is tired of moving. It is a fact that Harry didn’t necessarily have to move from Carstairs (that was Niall that needed to leave because he was “posing a threat to the staff”), but the thought of being stuck alone inside his own head again had made Harry more anxious than he’d ever been in his life, and he’d thrown fit after fit (and Harry was never a fussy patient, on the contrary, he just liked to go with the flow, take whatever medicine the hands said he needed and go to all of his meetings) until the staff had finally decided that the two were basically a packaged deal. 

And at this point, Harry thinks they are, because he can hardly focus without Niall. 

He guesses it’s his eyes, the piercing blue of them, the fierce intensity they get when he’s sharing one of Syd’s stories or situations. It’s the kind of alive-ness that dreams can’t fake, and when he’s talking to Niall, Harry’s a little less crazy. Ironic as that is. 

A tall man walks in from the office Niall and Harry are seated outside of, donned in a sweater/blazer combo and Harry vaguely remembers having a sweater similar to it when he was at home. He thinks he might have it with him. He doesn’t remember all the way. 

The man calls himself Dr. James. “But you can call me Greg, if you’d like,” he says, and Harry can tell he’s trying to be friendly, trying to build up a quick bond of trust, but he can’t really be bothered to care. It feels like deja vu when Greg chuckles and rubs his hands together a bit awkwardly, and Niall’s leg has started bouncing so Harry tries to focus in on the tap tap tap of his foot against the linoleum so he doesn’t zone out again.

It’s hard, though, when he’s alone in Greg’s office not to tune everything out. There’s a pretty bay window directly behind the desk, and Harry should be focusing on his new doctor and trying to make a good first impression but there’s a bird walking across the top of a bush and Harry thinks, well this has got to be a dream, wouldn’t the little thing just fall in?

Greg says his name then, one sharp “Harry” in a slightly raised tone, and the boy in question blinks his eyes a few times and stares into his face. 

“I asked how you were feeling,” Greg repeats, and Harry blinks again, trying to find something to ground himself and he settles on listening to the ticks of the clock above the window. 

“Just dandy,” he answers, moving his left hand to fiddle with the bracelets on his wrist. He snaps one and doesn’t feel anything. 

“For some reason, I don’t quite believe you,” Greg smiles out, and his fingers move to steeple together under his chin and Harry snorts. How doctorly of him. 

“I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s the truth.” 

Greg’s smile falters slightly and he moves his hands to shuffle through some papers on his desk. Harry glances down and sees a folder titled _Styles, Harry_ on top of another folder titled _Horan, Niall_ and he grimaces. 

“So how’s about you tell me a bit about yourself, eh? Bit about what you think about, what you like to do with your spare time?” Greg says, folding his hands on top of the folders and leaning forward on his forearms. Harry thinks he’s trying to look engaged in a conversation that doesn’t exist. 

He nods toward his folder and says “Pretty sure all you’re interested in is in there, isn’t it?”

And Harry doesn’t mean to be difficult, it’s just that he’s been through this one too many times already and he’s tired of it. He’s literally tired as well. He’d very much like to hurry this along so he can get to bed, get to a place where dreams are dreams and he’s absolutely certain of it. 

He’s faded out again, completely missed Greg’s response to his retort, and he frowns as he tries harder to zero in on the tick ticking of the clock. 

“Here’s something,” Greg says suddenly, quite literally as if he had just thought of something revolutionary in its depth. “When you sleep, and you dream, is there anything...unique and unusual that stands out to you?” he asks, leaning back in his chair a bit. “In the dreams,” he says quickly after, taking Harry’s hesitation as a need for more clarification.

And Harry does hesitate, but not because he doesn’t get it. He’s shared his sepia discovery with the last two shrinks, and he’s almost positive that it would be included in his file, probably written as a note right under the pretty little head casing they’d given him. _Depersonalization disorder_. He didn’t even think that sounded like a real thing. 

But he guesses Greg is asking for some other type of flag, something that should distinctly separate a dream from reality. 

But that’s what Harry’s problem is, that’s why he’s here in the first place, to get his head sorted out so he can function. 

And Harry wracks his brain and tries to bring up his most recent dream, tries to find a flaw, a difference, and he remembers something that might not even matter or make sense, but he wants to get out of this room and find a bed, so he says,

“Four fingers. Sometimes when I dream, everyone has four fingers.” And he looks up into Greg’s face and lifts his eyebrows. 

Greg smirks and picks up a pen, begins scrawling on a sheet in Harry’s folder. 

“What about if...when you feel yourself checking out,” he starts, dropping the pen and leaning back in his chair. “You count your fingers. You’ve got all ten, right?” he asks jokingly, and Harry blankly nods, not picking up on the sarcasm right away as he listens. 

“Right,” Greg continues, pushing his chair out and standing up. He’s tall, extremely tall, and Harry feels intimidated when he has to look up to see his face so he stands as well, and yes, that’s better, they’re almost level now. 

“Try that out for me till next week,” he says as he walks around the desk and claps Harry on the shoulder. 

And as he shakes his wrist out and checks his watch, Harry can tell he’s not going to like what he says next. 

“Looks like we’re just in time to get you to the New Year’s party,” he says, all faux excitement and leading Harry to the door.

And Harry was right, he doesn’t like the sound of that at all.

\- 

It’s 6:25 when Harry and Niall are hurried into a large square of a room. Harry chooses not to look up from his fiddling hands, decides to twist his fingers around in his shirt because he doesn’t like having too many people around, it makes him anxious. 

“They’re not purple, they’re people coloured, shut up,” Niall whispers next to him, and Harry kind of shuffles to his right so that he’s closer to him, so he can hear his whispers and stay tethered to reality with that, with Niall quietly arguing with his own mind. 

Another tall man had held the door open for them, and was now leading them towards a table covered in hats. Harry glances at his name tag as he gives them instructions and points to things and he reads off Paul and decides that he likes him the most because he’s not pretending to enjoy his time here. 

Harry looks back down to his hand and spreads his fingers out. 

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five. 

He thinks his lips move to mouth the words as he counts but he’s not entirely sure. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a bare foot come into view and it catches his attention. Who would be walking around with no shoes? Isn’t the floor cold?

He looks up from his hands into a tilted face, forehead blocked by fringe and head covered by a top hat with dog ears attached. He wasn’t aware his eyes had glazed over until just then, until he feels them go into full focus at the sight of the curiosity and unmistakable mischief in the pair of shocking blue eyes. They’re warm and cold at the same time and Harry’s breath sort of hitches in his throat. They’re sharp, striking. 

Blue is Harry’s favourite colour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from "fixin'" by walk the moon


	3. "the good are never easy, the easy never good

It’s 6:31 and Louis knows he’s staring. The blond boy and the one with green eyes are in Corner Four, talking to Paul as he points to the table of hats and then around the room and Louis’s head is still tilted and the boy with green eyes is fiddling with his bracelets and glancing at Louis over his shoulder, looking down quickly when he realises he’s still being stared at but Louis can’t stop.

It’s his eyes, it’s got to be, because while he was looking down, the boy looked dead terrified and also a bit dead _dead_ , like he was there but not really, and when he looked up into Louis’s face, it was like he'd come to _life_ and that excites Louis. He likes seeing dark things light up.

“What’re you staring at?” comes a voice directly next to Louis and he jerks slightly because he hadn’t even noticed Liam walk up and it’s not usually so easy for people to sneak up on him.

But Louis just shakes his head slightly and glances quickly to the younger boy, before looking back at Corner Four and resuming his tilted ogling.

“Thank you for that heartfelt answer,” Liam says, and from his peripherals, Louis can see him lift a cup to his mouth and begin looking vaguely in the direction that Louis is staring.

“Code green,” Louis says softly, and he watches as Paul stands to the side of the hat table to let the two new boys look. The blond boy rushes forward, excited and smiling as he touches every hat left. He ends up picking up a headband with cat ears on it, turning around and stuffing it atop the green eyed boy’s head. Green Eyes laughs at him, takes the headband off and shakes his hair out before he sweeping his fringe across his forehead with one hand and putting the headband back in place.

“We have codes now, too? Since when?” Liam asks, squinting at Corner Four, still searching for what has his friend so intrigued, and when he finally notices the two boys he’s never seen, his face lights up with realization.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says, and Louis glances over to him to shoot him an annoyed look before picking up where he left off.

After a few more minutes of silence, Liam lifts his cup to take another drink. “So, which one are you claiming?” he asks after he’s finished.

At that, Louis finally looks away completely. He scoffs and wrinkles up his nose at the brown eyed boy. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he snaps, crossing his arms.

“Well, you’re doing your weird...tilt-y head thing, and when I walked up, you looked as if you were about to swoon, so I’m guessing one of them has caught your attention?”

Louis sniffs and glares. He doesn’t like being so easily readable, even if it is just Liam. So instead of answering his question, Louis nods towards the other boy’s head.

“Where’s your hat?”

Liam snorts into his cup and sets it down on the table behind them before reaching behind his back and pulling out some contraption that looks way too complicated in Louis’s opinion to be a form of headdress. And after Liam unfolds it and presses it onto his head, Louis’s eyes widen because he knows people can be cruel and cliché but he can’t believe that a hand could have really handed Liam _a literal rain cloud._

“You’re kidding,” is all he can manage to say.

“I wish I was,” Liam replies.

“That’s got to be some form of hate crime,” Louis frowns.

“I think it might be,” Liam says as he retrieves his cup and leans back against the table.

Louis shakes his head as he folds his arms against his chest and follows suit, leaning against the table and crossing his feet at the ankle. He wriggles his toes and looks down at them, smirks a bit because Liam seems to be yellow now and it makes him happy. He’s about to ask what sparked the sudden change in heart when the boy next to him takes in a sharp breath and nudges his side with his elbow.

“Code green, heading our way,” Liam whispers, and he and Louis have just enough time to straighten up, because then Paul is in front of them with Blond Boy on his left and Green Eyes on his right and the latter is still wearing the cat ears and Louis didn’t notice it before, but Green Eyes is taller than him, considerably taller, and he has to look up to look into his face. Louis’s not sure how that makes him feel.

“Tomlinson, Payne,” Paul addresses them, and Louis scrunches his nose up at the formality of it.

“I’ve got a couple new friends for you to meet,” he says, and sort of awkwardly points to the boys on either side of him before putting his hands together and rubbing them. “I’ve explained the game to them already, shown them around a bit and...yeah, have it.”

Louis smirks to himself because yes, there’s the socially inept, afraid-to-say-the-wrong-thing Paul he knows and loves.

But then the taller man is shuffling his way back to the rec room doors and Louis doesn’t have him to distract from the very present and oddly quiet green eyed boy standing across from him. He notices he’s still wearing his cat ears and Louis kind of freezes because shit.

Green Eyes is looking at him kind of sheepishly, still fiddling with his bracelets, and Louis kind of wants to reach out and hold his hands still because watching him nervously fidget is making Louis nervous, and the fact that he just thought of holding some stranger‘s hands has him frowning and tearing his eyes away, looking to Liam quickly and then to the blond boy for lack of anywhere else to look. He’s smiling and his left hand is still tapping away at his thigh and his lips are moving in whispers. Louis tilts his head at him slightly and looks at his hat and then snorts when he sees the gigantic smiling sun sticker plastered on his plastic top hat. He looks to Liam with pure delight on his face and almost laughs when he sees the brown eyed boy nearly blanching.

“Syd wants to look at hats,” the small blond says suddenly, and before anyone can even get in a response, he’s grabbing Liam’s wrist and pulling him off towards Corner Four. Louis does laugh then, a quick ha and he tilts his head to the opposite side to watch them further but then Green Eyes is shuffling his feet and clearing his throat lightly and Louis’s drawn back to his face.

“Is he your friend?” he asks Louis, and for a moment he almost closes his eyes because Green Eyes has a very soothing voice, a type of slow and low rumble that reverbrates through Louis’s body and makes him shiver.

But he shakes his cloudy head and digs his toes into the linoleum.

“Who, Liam? I guess you could say something like that,” Louis says, his hands stuffing themselves back into his hoodie pockets and his toes wriggling. They feel a bit like ice but he doesn’t believe in shoes.

And suddenly this all feels terribly awkward, more so than it did a few minutes ago, because Green Eyes is just staring into Louis’s face, and Louis can’t bring himself to look away either. He watches the green irises go in and out of focus, like he’s wavering on the edge of something, like he’s in a trance, and Louis wants to snap it out of it if only to keep his own sanity. This new boy’s eyes were hypnotysing and distracting.

“What’s your name?” he asks suddenly, and the curly haired boy’s eyes go into full focus then, and Louis feels his head tilting, hears his brain thinking really? because it feels as if the two of them are having a conversation solely with their eyes and that’s...that sort of unsettles Louis. He read once that your eyes are the windows to your soul and he’ll deny ever thinking this later but he feels as if he’s already on some deep soul level with -

“Harry. My name’s Harry,” Green Eyes says slowly.

“Harry,” Louis repeats, and he scrunches his brow, letting the name sift through his brain a few times. Harry Hazza Haz, he thinks, and he must do more than think it, because Harry mouth is sort of quirking at the corners and Louis clears his throat quickly, shakes his head, and pulls himself up to sit cross legged on the table. Harry shifts toward him a bit slowly and sits on the edge with his feet dangling off.

“Since our dearest Paul introduced me so _rudely_ ,” Louis begins, raising his voice on the last word as he watches the man in question walk by in his peripherals. Paul stops briefly and looks him, wonders to himself why he ever took the job here in the first place, and stalks back to stand at the rec room doors. “I’m Louis,” he finishes.

Something in Harry’s eyes shift, kind of like something was locking in place, or like he was filing the name away for later, and Louis’s head is tilting again.

It kind of feels like his brain is swimming. Like, he knows where he is and he’s looking into these sickeningly breathtaking green eyes that are more like windows into the new boy’s brain, but he can’t piece any of it together. He can see the gears turning in Harry’s head, but he doesn’t know exactly what thoughts they’re manufacturing. And usually, people are so easy to read, Liam is the only one that he’s ever really felt the need to try and decode. It’s driving Louis mad and he’s only just met the boy.

“What about the blond, is he your friend?” he asks Harry suddenly, nodding toward Corner Four where he knows Liam is still appeasing the blond boy. He thinks it’s a rather dumb question, because he could tell when they first walked in that the two were connected on a much deeper level than just being new together, but the conversation had hit another stand still and as much as he was enjoying having a new puzzle of a person to solve, it was also starting to frustrate him. Louis only gets more frustrated when at the mention of the other boy, Harry’s eyes get impossibly brighter.

“Yeah, that’s Niall,” he answers, and his mouth curves up into a smirk as he looks over to Corner Four. Louis grimaces at the break in eye contact, twists his mouth like he’s tasted something sour, and looks to the corner as well, watches as Niall throws his head back and laughs while Liam looks mostly terrified.

Harry’s smile gets even brighter, and Louis wants to break something.

“He’s special,” Harry continues, and Louis doesn’t really understand the overwhelmingly territorial feeling that sweeps through his chest, but it’s there, and he’s just staring at the side of Harry’s face, about to snap out something rude when he notices that they aren’t alone anymore.

“Harry, Harry, Syd wants to talk to you,” Niall’s saying, and he’s kind of breathing hard, as if he ran over. When Louis tears his eyes away from the green eyed boy’s face to look at the returning pair, he notes the vice like grip the blond has on Liam’s wrist and the slight flush of his cheeks.

Harry jumps down from the table and reaches out for Niall, and Louis bites the inside of his cheek as he watches the taller boy reach down to briefly stop the tapping of the smallest boy’s fingers. Niall’s brow is furrowing and Harry’s is following suit and Louis is a little confused and a lot fumed.

“Emery wants to play but I don’t want to,” Niall says, and his frown is getting deeper and the intense way Harry is looking into his face lets Louis know something serious is happening.

Harry looks up and into Louis’s face and he looks faintly apologetic, and Louis tastes metal, and then the two boys are walking away, Harry holding onto Niall’s two restless fingers as the blond boy whispers to him. 

Louis watches them walk away and he hears Liam mutter something, but he’s mostly stuck in a tense trance until Paul has closed the doors behind them. 

\- 

The moon is leaving a pale shadow over the room and Louis can’t sleep. He thinks his brain has gone fuddy because he’s thinking back and he isn’t quite sure where his head went while he was talking to Green Eyes. And that weirdly intense feeling he’d felt when the boy had broken eye contact, that strange...possessiveness that had turned his chest heavy, Louis had never felt that before. Louis doesn’t like strong emotions, he really doesn’t.

So he’s tossing and turning and Nick seems to be asleep but he’s snoring and mumbling and it’s distracting Louis from his mental berating so he grabs his pillow and sits up and tosses it up onto the bunk above him, knows he’s hit his mark when Nick snorts once - loudly - and then quiets himself to small huffing breaths.

Louis lies back down and rolls onto his side. He’s thinking maybe now he can finally get some sleep, but he’s staring at a strip of moonlight on the wall and somehow his brain is comparing the pale glow to Harry’s eyes and he knows he’s well and truly fucked.


	4. "no, i won't punch a clock 'less it's ringing"

“Tap tap.”

There’s rustling above Harry’s bunk and he sighs as he rolls onto his back. He and Niall are rooming together tonight, “just until we get a more appropriate rooming situation together” he had remembered Paul saying, and Niall had been so excited about bunk beds that Harry couldn’t bear the thought of denying him the top. But now, with it being late and with Harry really wanting to get some sleep, he was starting to regret his decision.

“Tap tap,” he hears Niall saying again, and then the bed springs shift noisily and Niall is jumping down from his bunk and pacing the room.

“Tap tap,” Niall is saying, more urgently now, and he’s biting his nails and scratching at the side of his arm, and when Harry swings his legs out to rest on the floor, Niall’s head snaps around to look at him and his eyes look wild.

So Harry stands up slowly, approaching Niall almost as if he were a rabid animal about to pounce, (and if we were going based on appearances, that wouldn’t be too far off), and raising his hands to rest them on Niall’s shoulders.

The smaller boy flinches lightly and looks into Harry’s face, eyes wide and dull blue.

“Tap tap,” he says, and Harry sees the tears begin to well up.

“Talk to me, Niall,” Harry softly says, trying to be gentle because he’s seen Niall right before he explodes and this is exactly what it looks like. 

“Tap tap, he’s back,” the blond boy whispers, and he’s looking down between their bodies at his hands. Harry moves his hands up so his palms frame Niall’s neck, with his thumbs in front of his ears and his eyes back on his own.

“Who’s back?” Harry asks, and even though he already knows the answer, he doesn’t like it, so he’s asking just in case.

Niall’s eyes widen and a tear spills over and Harry sees the metaphorical timer on this conversation hit zero. 

“Tap tap, Ginger’s back,” Niall says, and compared to the hushed whispers that had been sharing, the smaller boy is practically yelling. “Tap tap, Ginger’s back, H, tap tap!” And he’s back to pacing, (pacing, more like running) back and forth in the tiny space of the room and his hands are in his hair and he’s scratching and pulling and Harry wants to reach forward and hold his arms down but Niall needs to blow some of this off first.

“He doesn’t like it here,” Niall is saying, and he’s talking fast, almost as fast as he’s pacing. “He doesn’t like it here, he doesn’t want us to be here, he doesn’t want it. He wants to go back, but we can’t and Emery wants to play but I don’t want to.”

Niall turns then to face Harry and his eyes are shifting again, jittering, going in and out of focus.

“They’re fighting and I don’t like it Harry,” he whispers. And then he’s punching himself.

Harry’s only ever gotten a basic overview of Niall’s voices. Syd is the one they both like the best because he’s harmless for the most part. He’s been with Niall since he was 13 and he tells him funny things and makes him laugh. Harry can appease Niall on the Syd situation because he can handle Syd.

Emery and Ginger are completely different cases because when Emery and Ginger come around, they’re far from harmless.

Emery’s the one that Niall blamed when he was caught when his hands down Nurse Jenna’s pants. And Ginger is the one he blamed after the doctors had pumped his stomach and gotten rid of the bottle of sleeping pills he’d nicked and taken all at once.

So when Harry’s grabbing Niall’s wrists and pinning them to his sides, trying to quiet the smaller boy, he feels dread settling in the front of brain. Syd is okay, Syd is like a childhood imaginary friend, but these two, they’re dangerous. It’s easy for Harry to forget that Niall is sick when it’s just Syd and Niall is telling him a riddle or an anecdote of being chased and attacked by a squirrel, but it’s hard to ignore it when there are people claiming rape and attempted suicides and Harry is scared because it seems like it’s happening again, before they’ve even settled here.

It takes Harry thirty-seven minutes to calm Niall down, to get him to stop thrashing and trying to rip his own hair out, and then it takes another seventeen to get him to breathe normally and lie down.

Niall falls asleep with his back pressed against Harry’s front, with both of his wrists in the larger boy’s hands. Harry lies awake and wonders how long their stay at Ashworth will be. 

\- 

Sometimes Harry thinks that if he were to kick the bucket, the cause of death on his certificate would read failure to thrive. And it’s not that he wants to die really, it’s just that he doesn’t really see the point in living sometimes. Everything about it seems painfully vague, and he watches so many people recklessly stomp through things and it makes him anxious. If he had to choose to either overcompensate and still be disappointed or do nothing, he would much rather lie down and accept his fate as failure.

Moreover, he doesn’t see the point in living if he’s stuck in a bloody mad house of all places because that wasn’t the plan, really. When Harry had run away from home, he had been expecting to find his bombshell and find his meaning in life, his anchor, his solid proof that everything was really real and _worth it_.

Instead, he’d somehow ended up lying in the middle of the street in Scotland with his phone to his ear, telling Gemma over and over “if a car comes, I’m not moving, I swear it, Gem, I mean it.” And a car had come, but it had been the police because his sister was sneaky and she’d kept him on the line while she texted a friend to call the authorities.

He’s not even sure why he called her then, he really hadn’t needed her help.

So in the end, Harry still hasn’t found his bombshell and Niall’s close but still not quite.

-

“This has got to break some sort of labour law, I mean, we are mentally handicapped and they still expect us to do the washing up?”

“Louis, they’re mostly _your_ dishes.”

“I don’t give a rat’s arse whose dishes they are, I didn’t even do the washing up when I was at home.”

“Never? With 4 sisters? I find that hard to believe.”

“Okay, I may have done them a _few times_ but that doesn’t mean I liked it.”

“Well, it’s a chore, you’re not really supposed to like it, it’s meant to, like...build character and all that. Make you a better person in society.”

“Fuck society!” Louis says, and then the dish he was washing is shattering across the floor and Louis thinks it’s hilarious.

“Oi!” comes a voice and it startles Louis out of his amusement. He and Liam look up to see Aiden rounding the corner and the young hand groans and throws his hands up.

“Jesus, Tomlinson, you’re to _clean_ the plates not _destroy_ them. What if George were to wander through here, he’d impale himself,” he says as he bends to start picking up the pieces of ceramic. Louis likes Aiden alright but most times the boy reminds him of his mum. Well, if his mum were six feet tall and a little more than moderately fit.

“Destruction sort of suits me, don’t you think?” Louis answers, smiling and wiggling his yellow gloved fingers at Aiden. Liam still his has hands elbow deep in his sink, body tilted and face slightly pained. Louis picks up some bubbles and blows them into his hair.

Aiden sighs as he stands upright again, carrying the ceramic pieces to the nearby trash can and tossing them in. For good measure, he takes the entire bag out and clutches it. 

“I am going to choose not to answer that,” he replies, quicky tying the nearly empty thing shut. “Instead, I am going to introduce you to two of your new fellow kitchen helpers.” And then he steps to the side and in walk Blondie Niall and Harry Green Eyes, and Niall’s eyes are lighting up as they land on Liam with his arms submerged in dishwater.

‘“Liam!” the blond yells, and he all but leaps over to Liam’s side and sinks his hands into the soapy water.

Liam responds with a slightly less enthused, “Niall,” and gives the smaller boy an awkward smile. Harry’s watching the exchange with widened eyes and Louis’s watching Harry because he’s really so fascinating to watch, even when he looks like a deer caught in headlights.

Then suddenly, his eyes are snapping to meet Louis’s and he kind of loses his train of thought for a second.

“So what do we need to do?” Harry asks, and his voice is syrupy slow and deep. Louis clears his throat in attempt to clear his head.

“Well, Liam and I were meant to be cleaning the dishes but I’ve finished mine -”

“More like smashed -”

“Details are not important, Liam.”

“I just don’t think it was necessary to -”

“But yeah,” Louis says, loudly cutting Liam off because he has a tendency to get all motherly and obnoxious at most of the things Louis does and it’s like. Louis’s own mum didn’t even baby him that much, christ.

Louis looks back to Harry and notices a whisper of a smile on his face and it makes him grin.

“Do you think you can handle everything here? I mean, now that you have another set of willing hands,” Louis asks Liam, turning back to him and gesturing to the sink where Niall is quietly focussed on washing his share of dishes.

“Hypothetically, if I were to say that I still needed your help, you would leave anyway, wouldn’t you?” Liam asks, turning around and leaning back against the sink as he peels his gloves off.

“Yes, probably,” is the answer he gets and Liam chuckles under his breath.

“Well, go on then.” He looks around Louis and smiles over to Harry. “Nice to see you again, by the way.”

Harry smiles back politely and Louis walks over to him and lifts a hand to touch his waist, because he’s had this nagging urge to touch him since the first time he saw him and he might have literally gone a bit crazy if he hadn’t done it soon.

“I want to show you something.”

\- 

Louis’s always like his privacy; whether it be a secluded corner of room with his back to everyone or an entire room to himself, most times he wants to be left alone. About his third day in Ashworth, he had started getting irritable, because it seemed like eyes were always on him, never leaving him alone to mull over his thoughts in peace. Which actually was true because the first three days are basically an introductory and 5150 hold time where they show you around and then monitor you to see if you’re a danger to yourself or others. Whatever, really.

But on the fourth day, Louis had been assigned his share of chores and essentially given a lot more freedom to do his own thing. That was the day he had found the art room. Before Ashworth had become so “modern psychiatric hospital”, Louis thinks it had all looked like the art room. He’d found it by accident on the fourth day; had been wandering through hallways when one he’d turned left instead of right down a back hall and ended up in a darker part of the hospital. The room was spacious, with desks and some weathered paper still intact and Louis had taken an instant liking to it.

“Wow,” Harry says in a hushed voice, moving to the centre of the room and turning around slowly. Louis had cleaned up the debris and trash over his years here, had scrubbed most of the grime off the handful of barred windows so that a dimmed sunlight could shine through. He hasn’t shown it to anyone before though, not even Liam, and he tilts his head as he watches Harry walk around and touch worm eaten desk tops.

“How did you find this?” he asks, looking up briefly to Louis and then continuing his slow pacing.

“By accident, when I first got here. I haven’t told anyone about it before. Didn’t really think anyone would appreciate it.” He mumbles the last bit and kicks at some dirt in front of his shoe. When he looks up, Harry is directly in front of him.

“I appreciate it,” he says, and Louis can feel his eyes soften. Harry smiles back and Louis grins. He’s known this peculiar green eyed boy for about 5 days now and he hasn’t really tired of him and his silent words yet. Louis thinks that must mean something big.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from "we's been waitin" by as tall as lions

**Author's Note:**

> i've been trying to get this done for months and months now and i'm finally writing again yay  
> fic title from "somebody please" by kimbra


End file.
